Sariputta on Nostr: Some people claim that they don’t need toknow how to die; they want to know how to ...

Some people claim that they don’t need toknow how to die; they want to know how to live their life—as if death were not a part of life, and as if the fact of death didn’t raise questions about what kind of life is the wisest life to live. From the Buddha’s point of view, though, trying to avoid those questions is to bury your head in the sand.

The Dhamma faces those questions head on. In answering them, it provides a framework for deciding what are the wisest and most worthwhile things to do with your life as a whole: which actions will be skillful in bringing long-term happiness, and which will bring long-term suffering and harm. As you go through life, calculating which actions are worth doing and which ones are not, you’ll want to know what counts as skillful, and how long “long-term” actually is.

For instance, if you believe that actions can have an impact on future rebirths, your calculations will be very different from what they would be if you believed that actions gave no results, or gave results that went no further than this lifetime. In giving clear answers to these larger questions, the Dhamma offters much more than a guide to the present. It explains how to recognize past mistakes so that you can learn from them, and how to plan for a satisfactory future.